I noticed an interesting press release today from Tableau Software. Australians will be familiar with Ray White Real Estate, but probably not familiar with the fact that they just decided to roll out BI to 5,000 of its sales agents to track KPI’s and view sales reports via a browser using Tableau. I think this is a really significant sale and I wonder if this is another step in the move towards insightful BI for the masses?

I’ve been watching the Tableau story from a distance for about a year now since a Queensland colleague mentioned it to me and have since suggested that two universities and several businesses might do well to have a closer look at it. I have only played with the downloadable demo but am quietly impressed with what I’ve seen and heard so far and I know that Stephen Few gets extremely effusive when talking about it.

I not only like the visualisation capabilities that everyone comments on but I love the idea of a reader that you can download (for free) and then use to intereact with the data in a workbook that someone sent to you.

I also currently have more than a passing interest in a project on the periphery of my current organisation that has decided to trial the product so I hope to be able to (at long last) actually make some direct comparisons between Cognos and Tableau and see just what that might mean for an institution like ours and maybe yours.

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